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Abstract
Liberal democracies, despite sharing common political and legal systems and values, responded differently when their citizens alleged they were tortured after 9/11. This article argues that understanding these state’s different responses is a highly complex matter and cannot be explained away by one factor or theory. However, a more nuanced understanding can be gleaned by examining the domestic legal and political context in terms of how it influenced civil society activism on the issue of the torture of citizens. Using the cases of Australia and the United Kingdom to illustrate, the article suggests particular features of the domestic context enabled or constrained rights activism with consequences for how liberal democracies responded to breaches of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. It examines two such features. The first is a country’s rights culture, and the way its history and prior experiences of human rights infractions condition the polity’s particular awareness of rights. The second is the country’s national human rights framework, which provides important levers for mobilisation around rights issues.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on contributor
Dr Cynthia Banham is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for International Governance and Justice at the RegNet School of Regulation and Global Governance, the Australian National University. She is a lawyer and a former journalist.
Notes
1. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, opened for signature 10 December 1984, 14565 UNTS 85 (entered into force 26 June 1987).
2. Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 18.
3. United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, released 9 December 2014, http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/press/executive-summary_0.pdf (accessed 5 July 2015).
4. AAP, ‘Howard Casts Doubt on Hicks Claim’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 May 2004.
5. Timothy McCormack, ‘David Hicks and the Charade of Guantánamo Bay’, Melbourne Journal of International Law 8, no. 2 (2007): 273.
6. Vikram Dodd, ‘Blair Makes Secret Plea to Bush on Guantánamo: Court Papers Reveal PM’s Effort to Persuade US to Send Back Four British Prisoners’, The Guardian, 26 June 2004.
7. David MacDonald and Brendan O’Connor, ‘Special Relationships: Australia and New Zealand in the Anlgo-American World’, in Anglo-America and its Discontents: Civilizational Identities Beydon West and East, ed. Peter Katzenstein (New York: Routledge 2012), 176; Tim Dunne, ‘“When the Shooting Starts”: Atlanticism in British Security Strategy’, International Affairs 80, no. 5 (2004): 893, 898.
8. Eric Neumayer, ‘Do International Human Rights Treaties Improve Respect for Human Rights?’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 6 (2005): 925, 930.
9. See, for example, Thomas Risse, Stephen Kopp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds, The Power Of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Beth Simmons, Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
10. Neumayer, ‘Do International Human Rights Treaties Improve Respect for Human Rights?’, 950.
11. George Williams, ‘Constructing a Community-Based Bill of Rights’, in Protecting Human Rights: Instruments and Institutions, ed. Tom Campbell, Jeffrey Goldsworthy and Adrienne Stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 247–62, 248.
12. Kent Roach, The 9/11 Effect: Comparative Counter-Terrorism (New York: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2011), 5.
13. Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, opened for signature 18 December 2002, 2375 UNTS 237 (entered into force 22 June 2006).
14. See, for example, Philippe Sands, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); David Cole, The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (New York: The New Press, 2009).
15. Leigh Sales, Detainee 002: The Case of David Hicks (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 6.
16. Ibid., 93.
17. McCormack, ‘David Hicks and the Charade of Guantánamo Bay’.
18. Channel Nine, ‘Transcript of the Prime Minister the Hon John Howard MP Interview with Tracey Grimshaw, Today Show, Channel Nine’, 20 May 2004, http://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/browse.php?did=21327 (accessed 5 July 2015).
19. Ibid.
20. Vivienne Thom, Inquiry into the Actions of Australian Government Agencies in Relation to the Arrest and Detention Overseas of Mr Mamdouh Habib from 2001 to 2005 (Canberra: Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, 2011), 68. https://www.igis.gov.au/sites/default/files/files/Inquiries/docs/habib-inquiry.pdf.
21. ABC, ‘Quick Trial for Hicks Essential: Ruddock’, 1 October 2006, http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/content/2006/s1752836.htm (accessed 5 July 2015).
22. Jospeh Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks 2006), 193.
23. David Hicks, ‘Communication to the United Nations Human Rights Committee’, Individual Communication Under the First Optional Protocol to the ICCPR in Hicks v. Australia, 23 August 2010.
24. Sales, Detainee 002, 213.
25. Thom, Inquiry into the Actions of Australian Government Agencies.
26. Margaret Satterthwaite, ‘Rendered Meaningless: Extraordinary Rendition and the Rule of Law’, The George Washington Law Review 75 (2007): 1333, 1336.
27. Thom, Inquiry into the Actions of Australian Government Agencies, 33, 47, 48, 79.
28. Andrew Tyrie, Roger Gough, and Stuart McCracken, Account Rendered: Extraordinary Rendition and Britain’s Role (London: Biteback Publishing, 2011), 93.
29. Steven Kettell, New Labour and the New World Order: Britain’s Role in the War on Terror (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 41.
30. Nicholas Watt, ‘Keep to the Law, Blair Tells Bush’, The Guardian, 10 July 2003.
31. BBC, ‘Lord Goldsmith’s Speech in Full’, 25 June 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3839153.stm (accessed 5 July 2015).
32. BBC, ‘Straw’s Statement in Full’, 19 February 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3504501.stm (accessed 5 July 2015); and Vikram Dodd, ‘Blair Makes Secret Plea to Bush on Guantánamo: Court Papers Reveal PM’s Effort to Persuade US to Send Back Four British Prisoners’, The Guardian, 26 June 2004.
33. The Detainee Inquiry, The Report of the Detainee Inquiry, 2013, 12.
34. The Detainee Inquiry, ‘Statement by the Chairman of the Detainee Inquiry’, 18 January 2012, http://www.detaineeinquiry.org.uk/2012/01/statement-by-the-chairman-of-the-detainee-inquiry/ (accessed 5 July 2015).
35. The Detainee Inquiry, The Report of the Detainee Inquiry, 1, 88–90.
36. Stephen Walt, ‘Alliances in a Unipolar World’, World Politics 61 (2009): 86.
37. Risse and Sikkink, ‘Conclusions’, in Risse et al., The Power Of Human Rights, 295.
38. Simmons, Mobilizing For Human Rights, 14.
39. Simmons, Mobilizing For Human Rights; see also Oona Hathaway, ‘Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference? ‘The Yale Law Journal 111, no. 8 (2002): 1935; Camp Keith, ‘The United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: Does it Make a Difference in Human Rights Behaviour?’, Journal of Peace Research 36, no. 1 (1999): 95.
40. Simmons, Mobilizing For Human Rights, 16.
41. Jean L. Cohen, Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 216.
42. The paradigm case of family mobilisation on human rights breaches is the ‘Mothers of the Disappeared’ in Argentina; see Kathryn Sikkink, ‘From Pariah State to Global Protagonist: Argentina and the Struggle for International Human Rights’, Latin American Politics and Society 50, no. 1 (2008): 1–29.
43. Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press 1994), 5.
44. For example, see in the US, Alan Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 2002); and in Australia, Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke, ‘Not Enough Official Torture in the World? The Circumstances in Which Torture is Morally Justifiable’, University of San Francisco Law Review 35 (2005): 581–616.
45. See generally R. Charli Carpenter, ‘Setting the Advocacy Agenda: Theorizing Issue Emergence and Nonemergence in Transnational Advocacy Networks’, International Studies Quarterly 51 (2007): 99; Alexander Cooley and Ron James, ‘The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action’, International Security 27, no. 1 (2002): 5.
46. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York; Basic Books, 1973), 89.
47. Neta Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 59.
48. David Schneiderman, ‘Property Rights and Regulatory Innovation: Comparing Constitutional Cultures’, International Journal of Constitutional Law 4, no. 2 (2006): 372, 374.
49. Julie Mertus, ‘Human Rights and Civil Society in a New Age of American Exceptionalism’, in Human Rights in the ‘War on Terror’, ed. Richard Wilson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 317, 324.
50. Cass R. Sunstein, ‘Rights After Communism’, East European Constitutional Review 4, no. 1 (1995): 61, 61.
51. For example, see David Charters, ed., The Deadly Sin of Terrorism: Its Effect on Democracy and Civil Liberty in Six Countries (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994); Philip Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro, Allies at War America, Europe, and the Crisis Over Iraq (New York: McGraw-Hill 2004).
52. Gordon and Shapiro, Allies at War, 60.
53. Hilary Charlesworth, Writing in Rights: Australia and the Protection of Human Rights (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002), 38.
54. G. John Ikenberry, ‘Conclusion: An Institutional Approach to American Foreign Policy’, International Organization 42, no. 1 (1988): 219, 220, 223.
55. James March and Johan Olsen, ‘The Logic of Appropriateness’, in The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy, ed. Michael Moran, Martin Rein, and Robert Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 689.
56. Peter Hall, Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France (Bristol: Polity Press, 1986), 19.
57. Tom Campbell, ‘Human Rights-Based Judicial Review: It Seems a Good Idea at the Time’, Dissent (Spring 2008): 13.
58. F.L. Morton and Rainer Knopff, The Charter Revolution and the Court Party (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000), 13.
59. Williams, ‘Constructing a Community-Based Bill of Rights’, 247, 248.
60. Lord Irvine, ‘The Tom Sargant Memorial Lecture: The Development of Human Rights in Britain Under an Incorporated Convention on Human Rights’, December 1997, http://www.roughjusticetv.co.uk/irvine.htm (accessed 6 July 2015).
61. Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, opened for signature 4 November 1950, 213 UNTS 221 (entered into force 3 September 1953) (European Convention on Human Rights).
62. These newspapers were, in Australia, The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald and, in the UK, The Guardian and The Times.
63. Simon Rice and Scott Calnan, Sustainable Advocacy: Capabilities and Attitudes of Australian Human Rights NGOs (Sydney: Australian Human Rights Centre, 2007), 20–2.
64. Based on the Amnesty International Australia website, http://www.amnesty.org.au/home?&gclid=CKL5rZ_0jcUCFRUJvAodtb0ABw, and the provision by Amnesty International Australia of its records of all press releases on the Hicks and Habib cases.
65. Jano Gibson, ‘1.8 m × 2.4 m: Living Like Hicks’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 March 2007.
66. Linda Morris, ‘Jensen Plan to Attract Men to Church’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 October 2006; Linda Morris, ‘Bishops Vow to Win Back Mass Drop-Outs’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 December 2006; Rick Wallace, Andrew McGarry, and Verity Edwards, ‘Archbishop and Dick Smith Fight to Bring Hicks Home’, The Australian, 8 February 2007; Cameron Stewart, ‘The Making of a Terrorist’, The Australian, 10 March 2007.
67. Telephone Interview with Muslim community leader, 18 January 2013.
68. Telephone Interview with ICJ official, 20 February 2013.
69. The Law Council’s press releases on torture were: ‘Law Council Alarmed at Guantánamo Bay Torture Allegations’, 8 October 2003; ‘Inquiry into Mistreatment of Guantánamo Bay Detainees Long Overdue’, 6 May 2004; and ‘Latest Law Council Report Highlights More Hurdles For Hicks’, 21 July 2005.
70. Law Council of Australia, ‘Independent Australian Observer Announced for Hicks Hearing’, 17 August 2004.
71. Richard Kerbaj, ‘Judges Seek Fair Trial for Hicks’, The Australian, 3 June 2006.
72. However, in 2011, The Australian editorialised that the Australian government must ‘do all it can to ascertain exactly what happened to Mr Habib while he was in custody of the Egyptian authorities’; see Editorial, ‘Leaks Reveal Terrorism Concern’, The Australian, 28 April 2011.
73. Telephone Interview with GetUp! official, 21 February 2013.
74. Telephone Interview with HRLC official, 19 June 2013.
75. GetUp!, Annual Report 2005–2006 (2006); ‘David Hicks – Military Commissions Act 2006 – Compliance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the Hamdan Decision and Australian Law’, HRLRC Opinion, 9 November 2006, http://www.hrlc.org.au/hicks-opinion-legality-guantanamo-military-commission-trial (accessed 5 July 2015).
76. Telephone Interview with Australian senator, 9 January 2013; Sales, Detainee 002, 89.
77. Cameron Stewart and Trudy Harris, ‘Habib Recruited for Jihad: Cleric’, The Australian, 17 July 2004.
78. House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, United Kingdom Parliament, Visit to Guantánamo Bay, 2007.
79. The Queen on the Application of Al Rawi v. The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs [2006] EWCA Civ 1279 [89]; The Queen on the Application of Abbasi v. The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs [2002] EWCA Civ 1598.
80. Hicks v. Ruddock [2007] FCA 299; Habib v. Commonwealth of Australia [2010] FCAFC 12.
81. Tania Branigan and Vikram Dodd, ‘The Bitterest Betrayal’, The Guardian, 19 July 2003.
82. Telephone Interview with detainee lawyer, 11 February 2013.
83. The Queen on the Application of Abbasi v. The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs [2002] EWCA Civ 1598.
84. Ibid., [64, 66].
85. Telephone Interview with detainee lawyer, 11 February 2013.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid.
88. Nicholas Watt and Vikram Dodd, ‘MPs’ Fury at Secret US Trials of “Terror” Britons – Minister Passes Commons Protest to Americans’, The Guardian, 8 July 2003.
89. Clive Stafford Smith, ‘US Censors Silenced Me Over the Gitmo Gulag’, The Guardian, 20 December 2004.
90. Louise Christian, ‘My Tortured Clients’, The Guardian, 15 September 2004.
91. Lord Justice Leveson, Report into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press, Volume 2, 29 November 2012. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/270941/0780_ii.pdf (accessed 6 July 2015).
92. Tyrie et al., Account Rendered.
93. Telephone Interview with NGO lawyer, 30 January 2013.
94. Telephone Interview with detainee lawyer, 11 February 2013.
95. They included London-based organisations Reprieve, The AIRE Centre, British Irish Rights Watch (BIRW), Justice (the International Commission of Jurists UK section), Liberty, Freedom from Torture and REDRESS. Key transnational NGOs included Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
96. Telephone Interview with Muslim human rights activist, 5 March 2013; see also Gareth Peirce, Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice (London: Verso, 2010).
97. Reprieve, ‘Human Cargo’: Binyam Mohamed and the Rendition Frequent Flier Programme, 10 June 2008, http://www.reprieve.org.uk/static/downloads/Microsoft_Word_-_2008_06_10_Mohamed_-_Human_Cargo_Final.pdf (accessed 6 July 2015); see also Ian Cobain, ‘Series of Allegations that Finally Forced Brown to Act: Brown Asks ISC to Look at Interrogation Policy Again Detainees Claimed MI5 Collusion as Early as 2005’, The Guardian, 19 March 2009.
98. REDRESS, The United Kingdom, Torture and Anti-Terrorism: Where the Problems Lie, December 2008, http://www.redress.org/downloads/publications/Where_the_ProblemsLie_10_Dec_08.pdf (accessed 6 July 2015).
99. Ian Cobain, A Secret History of Torture (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), 270.
100. Telephone Interview with human rights NGO official, 7 February 2013.
101. Telephone Interview with Muslim human rights activist, 5 March 2013.
102. National Human Rights Consultation, National Human Rights Consultation Report, September 2009, 149, http://www.ag.gov.au/RightsAndProtections/HumanRights/TreatyBodyReporting/Pages/HumanRightsconsultationreport.aspx (accessed 5 July 2015).
103. Hilary Charlesworth, Writing in Rights: Australia and the Protection of Human Rights (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002), 38.
104. Richard Rosecrance, ‘The Radical Culture of Australia’, in The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of The United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada and Australia, ed. Louis Hartz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964), 275; David Kinley and Christine Ernst, ‘Exile on Main Street: Australia’s Legislative Agenda for Human Rights’, European Human Rights Law Review 1 (2012): 58, 59.
105. George Williams, ‘A Decade of Australian Anti-Terror Laws’, Melbourne University Law Review 35, no. 3 (2011): 1136, 1141, 1161.
106. Chris Sidoti, ‘“Seeking a Right Way”: Keynote Address to Revitalising Human Rights and Social Justice Conference, Geneva: Seeking a Right Way’, 20 January 2005, http://www.hrca.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/acu-chris-sidoti-seeking-a-right-way00.pdf (accessed 6 July 2015).
107. Rice and Calnan, Sustainable Advocacy, 8.
108. Telephone Interview with GetUp! official, 21 February 2013; Telephone Interview with HRLC official, 19 June 2013.
109. Philip Ruddock, Op-Ed., ‘Some Lawyers Ignore their Profession’s Core Values’, The Australian, 3 November 2006.
110. George Williams, A Charter of Rights for Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007), 16, 41.
111. See for example an op-ed. by a prominent proponent of this view, former Foreign Affairs Minister Bob Carr: Bob Carr, ‘Bill of Rights is the Wrong Call’, The Australian, 9 May 2009.
112. Robert McClelland, ‘Address to the National Press Club of Australia – Launch of Australia’s Human Rights Framework’, 21 April 2010, http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/21248/20100723-1500/www.attorneygeneral.gov.au/www/ministers/mcclelland.nsf/Page/Speeches_2010_21April2010-AddresstotheNationalPressClubofAustralia-LaunchofAustraliasHumanRightsFramework.html (accessed 6 July 2015).
113. This situation was rectified in 2010 with the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Torture Prohibition and Death Penalty Abolition) Act 2010 (Cth).
114. Telephone Interview with human rights NGO lawyer, 18 January 2013.
115. Telephone Interview with HRLC official, 19 June 2013.
116. Amnesty International Australia, A Briefing for the Committee Against Torture, Submission to the Committee Against Torture, October 2007; Human Rights Law Resource Centre and National Association of Community Legal Centres, Australia’s Third Periodic Report to the UN Committee Against Torture, Submission to the Committee Against Torture, 6 July 2007; New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties, Shadow Report Prepared for the United Nations Committee Against Torture on the Occasion of its Review of Australia’s Third Periodic Report Under the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Submission to the Committee Against Torture, 27 July 2007.
117. Andrew Mumford, ‘Minimum Force Meets Brutality: Detention, Interrogation and Torture in British Counter-Insurgency Campaigns’, Journal of Military Ethics 11, no. 1 (2012): 10–25; Cobain, A Secret History of Torture.
118. Kent Roach, The 9/11 Effect: Comparative Counter-Terrorism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 241.
119. Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Andrew Mumford, ‘Torture, Rights, Rules and Wars: Ireland to Iraq’, International Relations 21, no. 1 (2007): 119–26, 122–3.
120. Case of Ireland v. The United Kingdom [1978] 2 Eur Court HR 25 [I]. The House of Lords in 2005 said it would have characterised the ‘five techniques as torture by contemporary standards’: see A (FC) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2005] UKHL 71 [97].
121. Telephone Interview with detainee lawyer, 11 February 2013.
122. Peirce, Dispatches from the Dark Side.
123. Gareth Peirce, ‘Was it Like This for the Irish?’, London Review of Books, 10 April 2008.
124. Lord Irvine, ‘The Tom Sargant Memorial Lecture’.
125. Lord Falconer, ‘Human Rights and Constitutional Reform’, 17 February 2004, http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=296 (accessed 6 July 2015).
126. Helen Duffy, ‘Human Rights Litigation and the “War on Terror”’, International Review of the Red Cross 90, no. 871 (2008): 573, 595–7.
127. Telephone Interview with NGO lawyer, 30 January 2013.
128. Committee Against Torture, Concluding Observations on the Fifth Periodic Report of the United Kingdom, Adopted by the Committee at its Fiftieth Session (6–31 May 2013).
129. See, for example, William D’Ambruoso, ‘Norms, Perverse Effects, Torture’, International Theory 7, no. 1 (2015): 33.
130. See, for example: William Gamson and David Meyer, ‘Framing Political Opportunity’, in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, ed. Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, and Mayer Zald (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 275, 277; David Meyer, ‘National Human Rights Institutions, Opportunities, and Activism’, in Human Rights, State Compliance, and Social Change: Assessing National Human Rights Institutions, ed. Ryan Goodman and Thomas Pegram (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 324, 329.
131. Matt McDonald and Matt Merefield, ‘How Was Howard’s War Possible? Winning the War of Position over Iraq’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 64, no. 2 (2010): 186.
132. Mark Shephard, ‘Parliamentary Scrutiny and Oversight of the British “War on Terror”: Surrendering Power to Parliament or plus ça change?’, in The ‘War on Terror’ and the Growth of Executive Power, ed. John Owens and Riccardo Pelizzo (New York: Routledge, 2010), 87, 99.
133. See for example The Baha Mousa Public Inquiry, 31 December 2011, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120215203912/http://www.bahamousainquiry.org/ (accessed 6 July 2015).